“Truth, she thought. As terrible as death. But harder to find.”
― Philip K. Dick

“I don’t believe anything, but I have many suspicions.”
― Robert Anton Wilson

“The fundamental delusion of humanity is to suppose that I am here and you are out there.”
― Yasutani Roshi

On Music & Silence

“I want to sing like the birds sing, not worrying about who hears or what they think.”
― Rumi

Rumi

“Music expresses that which cannot be put into words and that which cannot remain silent.”
― Victor Hugo

“The only truth is music.”
— Jack Kerouac

“After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.”
― Aldous Huxley

“Silence is only frightening to people who are compulsively verbalizing.”
― William S. Burroughs

“When you are Angry, Be Silent.”
— Bukhari

On Suffering

“Man suffers only because he takes seriously what the gods made for fun.”
― Alan W. Watts

“Out of suffering have emerged the strongest souls; the most massive characters are seared with scars.”
― Kahlil Gibran

“What is hell? I maintain that it is the suffering of being unable to love.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky

“The world breaks every one and afterward many are strong at the broken places.”
― Ernest Hemingway

On Dreams & Possibility

“Because you are alive, everything is possible.”
― Thích Nhất Hạnh

Thích Nhất Hạnh

“I love those who yearn for the impossible.”
― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

“If I were to wish for anything, I should not wish for wealth and power, but for the passionate sense of the potential, for the eye which, ever young and ardent, sees the possible. Pleasure disappoints, possibility never. And what wine is so sparkling, what so fragrant, what so intoxicating, as possibility!”
― Søren Kierkegaard

“I dream. Sometimes I think that’s the only right thing to do.”
― Haruki Murakami

“It is not true that people stop pursuing dreams because they grow old, they grow old because they stop pursuing dreams.”
― Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

“Hold fast to dreams,
For if dreams die
Life is a broken-winged bird,
That cannot fly.”
― Langston Hughes

On Change

“You could not step twice into the same river.”
― Heraclitus

Heraclitus

“Life is a series of natural and spontaneous changes. Don’t resist them; that only creates sorrow. Let reality be reality.”
― Lao Tzu

“Let everything happen to you
Beauty and terror
Just keep going
No feeling is final”
― Rainer Maria Rilke

“The only way to make sense out of change is to plunge into it, move with it, and join the dance.”
― Alan W. Watts

“A good traveler has no fixed plans and is not intent on arriving.”
― Lao Tzu

“Life’s under no obligation to give us what we expect.”
― Margaret Mitchell

On Zen & Taoism

“Flow with whatever may happen, and let your mind be free: Stay centered by accepting whatever you are doing. This is the ultimate.”
― Chuang Tzu

“You can feel an emotion; just don’t think that it’s so important.”
— John Cage

“No snowflake ever falls in the wrong place.”
― Zen Proverb

“The instant you speak about a thing, you miss the mark.”
― Zen Proverb

“You must let what happens happen. Everything must be equal in your eyes, good and evil, beautiful and ugly, foolish and wise.”
― Michael Ende

“Worry is preposterous; we don’t know enough to worry.”
— Wei Boyang

“If you understand, things are just as they are; if you do not understand, things are just as they are.”
― Zen Proverb

On Mystery

“The longer I live, the more uninformed I feel. Only the young have an explanation for everything.”
― Isabel Allende

Isabel Allende

“Mysteries abound where most we seek for answers.”
― Ray Bradbury

“He who does not answer the questions has passed the test.”
— Franz Kafka

“Talk of mysteries! — Think of our life in nature, — daily to be shown matter, to come in contact with it, — rocks, trees, wind on our cheeks! The solid earth! The actual world! The common sense! Contact! Contact! Who are we? Where are we?
― Henry David Thoreau

“The frog in the pond knows little of the great ocean.”
― Zen Proverb

“Astonishment is the proper response to reality.”
— Terence McKenna

“Life is not a problem to be solved, but a reality to be experienced.”
― Søren Kierkegaard

On Death

“Life is for the living.
Death is for the dead.
Let life be like music.
And death a note unsaid.”
― Langston Hughes

Langston Hughes

“As I have not worried to be born, I do not worry to die.”
― Federico García Lorca

“Nobody owns life, but anyone who can pick up a frying pan owns death.”
― William S. Burroughs

On Freedom

“People demand freedom of speech as a compensation for the freedom of thought which they seldom use.”
― Søren Kierkegaard

“Nothing is more wonderful than the art of being free, but nothing is harder to learn how to use than freedom.”
— Alexis de Tocqueville

“Live, travel, adventure, bless, and don’t be sorry.”
— Jack Kerouac

On Nature

“The clearest way into the Universe is through a forest wilderness.”
― John Muir

John Muir, 1907

“Trees are sanctuaries. Whoever knows how to speak to them, whoever knows how to listen to them, can learn the truth.”
― Hermann Hesse

“Trees are poems the earth writes upon the sky,
We fell them down and turn them into paper,
That we may record our emptiness.”
― Kahlil Gibran

“The wise man knows that it is better to sit on the banks of a remote mountain stream than to be emperor of the whole world.”
― Zhuangzi

“Nature does not hurry, yet everything is accomplished.”
― Lao Tzu

“We are perishing for want of wonder, not for want of wonders.”
― G.K. Chesterton

“We can never sneer at the stars, mock the dawn, or scoff at the totality of being.”
― Abraham Joshua Heschel

“Consistency is contrary to nature, contrary to life. The only completely consistent people are the dead.”
― Aldous Huxley

“A morning-glory at my window satisfies me more than the metaphysics of books.”
― Walt Whitman

“I believe in God, only I spell it Nature.”
― Frank Lloyd Wright

“The earth has music for those who listen.”
― George Santayana

On Genius & Insanity

“In individuals, insanity is rare; but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

Friedrich Nietzsche

“We do not have to visit a madhouse to find disordered minds; our planet is the mental institution of the universe.”
― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

“Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves.”
― C.G. Jung

On Justice & Politics

“Never forget that justice is what love looks like in public.”
― Cornel West

“He who loves the world as his body may be entrusted with the empire.”
— Lao Tzu

“Protest beyond the law is not a departure from democracy; it is absolutely essential to it.”
― Howard Zinn

On Modern Life

“We need way more intimacy than nearly anyone considers normal. Always hungry for it, we seek solace and sustenance in the closest available substitutes: television, shopping, pornography, conspicuous consumption — anything to ease the hurt, to feel connected, or to project an image by which we might be seen and known, or at least see and know ourselves.”
― Charles Eisenstein

“We live in a world where there is more and more information, and less and less meaning.”
― Jean Baudrillard

“If you don’t have a strategy, you’re part of someone else’s strategy. ”
― Alvin Toffler

“Americans may have no identity, but they do have wonderful teeth.”
― Jean Baudrillard

“We in the richest societies have too many calories even as we starve for beautiful, fresh food; we have overlarge houses but lack spaces that truly embody our individuality and connectedness; media surround us everywhere while we starve for authentic communication. We are offered entertainment every second of the day but lack the chance to play. In the ubiquitous realm of money, we hunger for all that is intimate, personal, and unique.”
― Charles Eisenstein

On Compassion & Generosity

“That’s what I consider true generosity: You give your all, and yet you always feel as if it costs you nothing.”
― Simone de Beauvoir

Simone de Beauvoir

“No one has ever become poor by giving.”
― Anne Frank

“The greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged by the way its animals are treated.”
― Mahatma Gandhi

“One’s life has value so long as one attributes value to the life of others, by means of love, friendship, and compassion.”
― Simone de Beauvoir

On Everything & Nothing

“Disillusionment in living is finding that no one can really ever be agreeing with you completely in anything.”
― Gertrude Stein

Gertrude Stein

“Most of our ancestors were not perfect ladies and gentlemen. The majority of them weren’t even mammals.”
― Robert Anton Wilson